Giraffe's Can't Dance paintings

This is a great project to teach the idea of both figurative-type drawing and creating a sense of movement. I try and teach it every year to my Grade 5's. The book, that this lesson is based on, is also very charming and gives a wonderful message about being yourself. 

I posted about this lesson a couple of years ago and you can see more of the steps HERE.

I tend to change up the background every year or so and have done the background paper using watercolour, liquid tempera and tempera cakes (seen below). 

The students draw their own giraffe dancing in a pose of their choice on regular white paper. 

They colour this using coloured pencils and outline it with a fine tip Sharpie. These are then cut out and glued carefully onto their background paper. 

This display is always a crowd pleaser and makes everyone who views it smile!

First: paint a background sky and ground and hills with paint of your choice. 

I demonstrate how to fade out a full moon.

Draw your giraffe in pose of your choice. Outline in sharpie. Colour. Cut out.

Some Grade 5 artworks:

 

Interlocking Hearts Valentine Drawing

Here is a gorgeous Valentine themed lesson that teaches excellent shading skills. 

It focuses on using shading to turn a flat 2D shape into a 3D form. 

These were made by Grade 6 students. I give them the choice of using pencil or colored pencil for their good copy.  Most stick with pencil as it's a bit easier to shade with. We use drawing pencils (4B) and blenders to get a nice shading effect.

See all the steps in my previous post HERE.

This group of students was one of my strongest yet so their final drawings turned out particularly well. 

The student below added white gel pen detail to her piece.

 

Heart Notans

Nōtan (濃淡) is a Japanese design concept involving the play and placement of light and dark elements as they are placed next to the other in the composition of art. This use of light and dark translates shape and form into flat shapes on a two-dimensional surface. Nōtan is traditionally presented in paint, ink, or cut paper, but it is relevant to a host of modern-day image-making techniques, such as lithography in printmaking, and rotoscoping in animation.

We can also look at it in terms of positive and negative space.

These were created by junior high students.

The biggest challenge is keeping track of all the small pieces and not losing them! 

They create a large heart shape from coloured paper. Then they cut out shapes from the edges and flip them over and glue them in a mirror image outside of the heart shape. 

I found the idea for the project HERE on the Apex Elementary Art blog.

Some finished notans: